Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EGHLUOM Wordo: SEDGY

  • 26 September 2025

    It has been some time since the last entry...

    Well, to be honest: Nothing remarkable happened, life did just go on and i thought it would be somewhat boring to report about the daily stuff. Well, summer is gone now and we entered fall, surprisingly this year the first firing up of the oven went without turning the whole house into a smoker - i guess this is a good sign.

    My dad - who is now living in a retiring home - is making unexpected progress again. We thought from time to time that he would be not able to walk again, but recently he is getting better, much better indeed. It is somewhat weird seeing someone in his mid-80s getting stronger again after a bad streak of luck. At the moment we are really contemplating if he gets well enough to come back home. Honestly: The thought fills me with joy.

  • 🖼️ xkcd: Hiking #3147

• Politics and World Events

  • Digital IDs Announced in the UK - Everyone is Outraged

    Prime Minister Starmer has announced that digital IDs will become mandatory for employment 'right to work' checks. The French government has claimed that the lack of these checks is a key factor in encouraging irregular migration into the UK via France. This is unlikely, since France has universal ID cards, yet has a similar sized undocumented worker percentage as the UK. So what is going on?

    Labour has tried to introduce ID cards in the past, under Gordon Brown and then later with Tony Blair as PMs, but it failed each time after an outcry. The British, despite knowing that the entire EU has had ID cards without problems for decades, think that it will result in the loss of essential freedoms. Which freedoms? No one is really sure of that, but they are really upset! Perhaps they might be asked to prove their identity when starting a job (I had to show my passport) or when going to the pub (most young people buy driving licences for this purpose).

    Perhaps they are worried about being stopped by the police? Lots of objections use the scary phrase "My I see your papers?" which is a bald, and rather racist, reference to wartime Germany. But police have always been able to request drivers show their driving licence, without the population thinking their freedoms were being restricted. In this case, you still don't need to carry your licence - you normally have a week to present your ID to a police station. So many youngsters and older people already carry their driving licence for ID purposes, but they don't fear that carrying it will become mandatory when driving or otherwise.

• Science

  • Young Feet

    Therefore, your feet are probably younger than your head, moreso if you stay upright more than not. The amount isn't very much, given that over 4.5 billion years the delta is only a "day or two" for the Earth, and the feet-head distances are much smaller than for core-crust, and for various reasons the feet can sometimes be level with or above the head.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Yet more notes on web bot activity

      For the past few months, every other week my server (which hosts this blog) would just go crazy for a day and require a full reboot to get back to normal. I haven't tracked down a root cause for this, but I do suspect it has to do with web bot activity increasing over the past few months. I ran a query over the logs for August, generating the number of requests per second and here are the top ten results: [...]

    • Oh, it's a bug on my side that prevents full conditional requests

      I'm still pouring through web sever log files [1] and I'm noticing that many of the feed readers fetching my various feeds files aren't using conditional requests. I was in the process of writing to the author of one of them [2] describing the oversight when I noticed that particular feed reader using both methods of conditional requests: the If-Modified-Since: header and the If-None-Match header in conjunction with a HEAD request. I thought I should test that with my web server, just to make sure it was not a bug on my side.

    • Hello, Gemini! (by ~octagon)

      I have been launched.

    • From browser bloat to software development plan

      I've been daily driving firefox since I switching to linux, but recently I notices Mozilla start shipping more and more anti-feature with firefox, some of those are; AI sidebar, firefox view, firefox sync, etc. I do understand why some people want to sync their bookmark, settings, history; it's more convenient to let "sync-services" automatically copy those data instead of manually copy them yourself. From what I remember when using chrome's sync feature, sync settings is very usefull but I rarely look into history or bookmark from other chrome session. For firefox view: recent browsing, open tabs, recently closed tabs, tabs from other devices, history; I don't understand why they added it to firefox, it just has the same data with history that can be open with `ctrl+h`. For `AI sidebar`, seriously who tell the devs to add it? Why not tell the user who want it to switch to other browser that have this feature? I know where to find AI if I want to use it.

      I heard that LibreWolf is firefox but hardening, removing all of that anti-feature. I tried to switch to it but I can't get it to run on my machine yet, the main reason are my remaining disk space and amount of ram require to compile it. (Also there are some logged in session I don't want to lose but that's just a excuse.)

    • futuristic html4 theme

      This platform has 99 default templates for those who want to try creating a website from that era but don't have any experience with layout. Register and feel like you're back in the 90s.

      with http://web1.0hosting.net/ You can access the internet even from an 8086 computer running MS DOS. Your own ecosystem! It's not just hosting, it's email (which works on MS DOS and modern browsers and easily sends emails to Gmail and other modern emails). It's chats for MS DOS machines, for older Windows (compatible with IE6), forums, a search engine that works on everything, your own community, not just an admin email address at the bottom of the site (as is often the case), but dozens of people who will help you figure out your code and create a website. That's why we're better than neocities—we help.

  • Programming

    • DHH, Ruby Central, and the Current Problems

      The other day, one of my social media mutuals, who I met through our shared love of the Blue Jays, posted about DHH (David Heinemeier Hansson), noting that so many male colleagues over the years had called her a bitch for calling him out.

      I'm a bit out of the loop. I remember he was embroiled in the Basecamp "talking politics on the company slack will get you fired :) :)" thing back in 2021, which is honestly enough to glean exactly what his politics is. But then he dropped off my radar, because I'm not in the Rails world, I haven't written anything in Ruby in probably ten years (though we use it at work, just not my own particular team), and haven't really cared about it since zed shaw's "Learn Ruby the Hard Way" was making the rounds a long time ago. I dismissed him as yet another tech guy who was a piece of shit to work with.

      [...]

      I feel like how Ruby, and Rails, comes out of this over the coming months is going to define how the community is seen for the next decade. Whether it's an ecosystem with a deep community, as it always was before, or whether things are defacto dictated by DHH, and Shopify, and a small cadre of people and companies with particularly odious views. I hope, but don't expect, that those at the top think about that. Because once a project has that kind of stink, it's almost impossible to wash away.